


Terra Incognita

by minor_ramblings



Category: Chalion Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen, Ista argues with everything ever, Prodding fictional theology with a stick, Yuletide 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:40:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minor_ramblings/pseuds/minor_ramblings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After three years' work hunting demons in Jokona, Ista dy Chalion is looking forward to a rest.  She's not anticipating a new challenge, nor a visitation with the one deity she was sure she'd never speak with again.   (Written for Yuletide 2013)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Terra Incognita

**Author's Note:**

  * For [brutti_ma_buoni](https://archiveofourown.org/users/brutti_ma_buoni/gifts).



Three years’ work, following first the army and then rumour after rumour, had brought them to this sticky summer’s day in the coastal hills of Jokona. Ista’s travelling court travelled slow, directed off the main road and its smooth Roknari masonry by a landslide that had displayed no favouritism for flawless fitted stonework over rough Chalionese cobbles and mud.  This side road was practically a reminder of home in its meandering ruts and vagaries of grading, ancillary enough that no military troop transport or wealthy trade caravans had encouraged its renewal.  It looped and twisted through warm valley woods that served primarily to trap the sweltering heat and apply a bonus of biting flies on top of it, but in another four hours, or so Ilvin’s maps feigned, they would come upon a hilltop inn that promised respite and, most alluring of all, a good bath.   

She was a far cry from sheltered Ista dy Chalion now, and even the modest incognito of Ista dy Ajelo would be hard pressed to be recognized beside a build that had grown lean and trim very nearly in self defense against the daily riding.  But the plagues of elementals infesting Jokona had tapered, then trickled, and now they’d not seen a demon, other than those presently accounted for in the party, in the last three weeks.   She could, perhaps, allow herself to dream of a rest, of cool, crisp linens in a soft bedchamber, and not one slept in alone.   She could dream…

The force struck Ista between one turn of the Jokonan track and the next.

A flare of light stunned her inner eye and she heard herself gasp. Demon reared and squealed beneath her.  A man’s shout – Foix? – as the white overload resolved itself into a high wall, rivalling the Zangre itself, that blocked all passage forward and stretched in a wide ring with no portal through it in sight. Rippling green twisted with stark white against her inner eye, blended and pulsing sluggishly as though some internal force that sustained it was slowly drawing down for all of its seeming solidity.

And yet…

The first half of their company was already past the barrier, of which there had been no sign moments before and which showed no sign of impeding them now.  Only saint, sorcerer and demon-horse showed any sign of shying back, and what reactions were forming in the rest of the troop were patently in reaction to their own.

She steadied Demon and Ilvin was beside her in half of a heartbeat and four strides of Featherwits’ appallingly long legs, the question writ in his dark eyes even before he could speak it.  His “What did you see?” was every inch the concerned warmaster to one of his scouts, and she felt a moment’s foolish joy in it, the casual affirmation of his belief in her sanity, in her agency, that had yet to grow old even three years into their uncanny campaign together.

“A wall,” she murmured, slipping down from Demon’s saddle and passing Ilvin the reins with her hand closing briefly over his in the transfer.   The tall chestnut would no doubt have moved forward at her command had she asked it of him or of the demon that he carried, but she saw no cause to alarm the animal, or its hidden rider, without clear need.   What she _did_ feel was the same calm certainty she’d felt before, some quiet knowledge she would admit, now, was gods-given, and she spoke to him of it as she stepped away. “I believe I know why we were turned to this road.  I just need to conduct a small… test.”

“That statement would be a deal more reassuring without that look in your eye, dear Ista.  I won’t ask you not to alarm me with whatever you’re about to do, but do try not to leave me having to explain it to poor Demon.  He worries for you when you leave him behind, you know.”

“Oh,” she said, matching his smile down at her with an upturned one of her own. “Well. For the sake of the _horse_ , then.” 

She strode forward, lifted her hands as a conduit for her spirit ones, reached out, touched the shifting unlight of the barrier.  She felt the energy of it jolt up her forearms, flooding her mind with energies and clotted memories and the gut-wrenching familiarity of a god’s gift, twisted. Her legs buckled beneath her, and she was sure that some alarming noise had escaped her, for something had to have caused that alarmed shout of “ _Ista_!” of Ilvin’s, ringing through the heavy summer air.  _I should have expected--_ she had a moment’s thought to herself before thought itself dissolved into the roaring of her mind.

\-----------

She awoke in the white room, light and airy.  Her mind’s audience chamber, a nervously joking dy Cabon had named it after an abortive attempt to explain to him her meetings with his – their – god.   But it was not the Bastard that waited for her today, in dy Cabon’s round guise or any other’s.   A woman in dark and draping green was arrayed upon a richly upholstered chaise, hair pure white and coiled in meticulous braids of a fashion decades past and, Ista knew, fondly kept ever since in a rare display of vanity.   She’d spent long hours brushing that hair, when an old woman’s pain-sharpened tongue had left her attendants too quailed to be restful company.    But this was not the Provincara of Ista’s last memory, fuddled from pain and sickness and syrup of poppies.  The woman on the chaise borrowed largely of her mother, but the lines of her face had more of Learned Tovia’s good humoured poise, and, like all of her kin, no mere mortal’s eyes could compare to the dark emeralds that looked onto and contained infinities within them in equal measure.  

The Mother of Summer.

“You are… not as I remember you,” Ista managed, lingering near the doorway and _damn_ the Bastard for his strayed cat analogies. 

The Mother smiled, warm but wearied somehow. “When last you saw me, I was come to the court of a highborn young bride in her childbearing.  You are well past that now, you who have cared for your mother in her turn and seen her safely to my hand.  You see a different aspect of me now.”

“And what aspect is that?”

“Of the old woman who reflects on her joys and her regrets in equal measure.  Of the mother who looks to her children grown and see them as they once were, even as she is proud of whom they have become.  Does not every mother have her regrets for things done, or said, or left unsaid and undone?    We have not been easy on you, bright Ista.”

Ista snorted uncomfortably, moved away from the doorway and claimed a corner of the room for herself, arms folding across her chest.  Unlike the Bastard’s vile sense of humour regarding her wardrobe, she was clothed, this time in the memory of the borrowed white festival wear she’d worn three years ago in Porifors as horrors and bloody battles came to the pivot point of two middle aged women facing each other.  The Mother held a woman’s sense for the layered meaning of clothing, it seemed.

“Is understatement another of your aspects?  _Not been easy_ covers ground a great deal less treacherous than murder by misadventure and fifteen years a madwoman.”

The goddess seemed not to hear her, continuing on like a tutor at lecture.  Or, perhaps, a divine.  Or a mother.  She fancied she could hear some of her own mother’s cadences in that Voice.    For herself, the curse had swallowed all parental responsibilities, and now Iselle was grown past all lecturing, a stranger-daughter grown to womanhood and forging tentative adult bonds.  “When first I came to you, you were still as much my Daughter’s child as my own, passing between our realms as a pilgrim on the roads.   With child as you were, your nature drew alongside my own for a time and so a space for dreams and visions came open to me.  But it is the nature of dreams, even Our true dreams, that much of meaning is lost in them.  And it is the nature of visions that they may show what has been and may even show what may yet come to pass, but they cannot show an understanding of either. “

Decidedly a divine, a droning one.  She perhaps ought not to be so free to criticize a god’s elocution, not when so many pious persons would claim to give their lives to hear them speak.   But then, _she_ had never asked the gods for their attention.   They were drawn to her, and if flies to blood was an unsettling metaphor, then perhaps dy Cazaril’s metaphor of the sword was only incorrect in the shape of the object.  She seemed to be a holy lightning rod, drawing in bolts that would surely have hit other targets without her nearby.  “One wonders, then, why the gods should bother with such unreliable couriers as dreams.  You do not send messages, you send mysteries.  Your _son_ delights in my aggravation with them and his chosen name denies me the satisfaction of cursing him for it.”

 “We had hoped to find mortal guidance for you, but the roya was beyond the Father’s reach, trapped within the curse.  Lord dy Lutez dreamt but did not hear Us. “ 

“You have a far warmer opinion of my supposed obedience than I do.  I turned from You after the disasters I invoked attempting to follow Your instructions.”  _Pointedly_ , she thought, _for all that I would turn again and again to them in frenzied, unanswered prayer._   “How, then, do I differ from Arvol, who died as much from my blindness as his own human frailty?

“You have always heard Our call, Ista, however it has come and however you have chosen to answer it.  One cannot scream in opposition when you have heard nothing to oppose.”

She bit at her cheek then, stifling a protest that seemed likely to be roundly ignored rather than waste her breath on it. The Mother likewise fell silent then took a new tack, as if Ista were some toddling child failing to grasp the significance of names for colours or numbers.

“Expectation constrains even the gods.  Perhaps the gods most of all.  Mother, Father, Daughter, Son… we are spirit shaped by the same tools that work in the world of matter.  We are craftsmen who are crafted again in turn.”

She was abruptly irritated past the point of reason. “That is all very pretty, and were I your Daughter’s chosen I would no doubt spend the rest of my days trying to fit that sentiment to lyric verse, but what, Lady, is the _point_ of all this?  I was called to this place, the barrier is evident to those with the Sight to see it.  What of the practicalities?”

“I speak of souls,” the goddess answered, with deceptive simplicity.  “The gods as you name us were not always so. Once, we were not _we_ at all, but a singular Presence, of order as formless as the chaos we opposed.   Perfect, and yet static, locked in stalemate with our opposing pole.  Matter arose from the grinding front between order and chaos, as dust gathers along the teeth of a saw.  It took the work of matter to separate us, for minds to arise and think of the infinite and give it bounds that they might understand it by.  And by the understanding of the souls as they pass into our hands, so too does our knowledge of the world of matter grow.    But there are always those reaches into which we cannot see, or can only see imperfectly.   Demons, as creatures of chaos, have their motivations hidden from us should they escape my son’s keeping except that a chosen Saint bridges that gap. Free will we can account for as best we can, but as long as men can will or nil, then there will be prayers unanswered.   Such as your own.  

“You ask for practicalities.  It is difficult for a god to speak so plainly of the world of matter, for as wondrous as our realm is to you, so is your realm to us.  But, for the harm I have done you with my mysteries, my daughter, I shall offer you what clarity I can as a gift.   Thusly:  as We could not foresee that human weakness would twist the Golden General away from Our hopes for him, could not anticipate the influence of the ancient demon that took his daughter Joen, so too We could not anticipate all the consequences of the curse’s removal.   That is what awaits you beyond this wall.  That is the cause and consequence of it, but the solution is beyond Our comprehension.“

“I… believe you must dissemble, Lady, or else the divines’ claims of your omnipotence are sadly overstated.” _I have just accused a goddess of lying to me, for no better reason than my own fear that what she says is truth.  This, I believe, is far greater madness than any part of my sad years beneath the curse._

The goddess seemed untroubled by this, sharing for a moment the same smile, private and wry, that she’d seen from the Provincara in more personal moments

 “Your conductor does better than most, as he is our bridge between order and chaos, but even he is limited.   We have had many millennia to study the ways of matter, and of men chief among it, but where there is free will then there is only so far we can predict.  The gods plan, but it is ultimately the hands of men that allow us to act.  Sometimes it is the hand of a singularly determined royina.”

“ _Stubborn_ is perhaps a more accurate term.  I am, reluctantly, a saint.  I shed no miracles except that they draw their power through You, and you say that this road I walk is one I must travel without a guide.”

“You have undertaken such a walk before,“ the Mother pointed out.  “We do not know the solution to the tangle that lies ahead of you, but we _do_ know that all your roads have lleft you fit to walk this one as well..  Stay the course.  We will be carried with you as surely as you once carried my son into the heart of the enemy camp.  But for now… I believe that my son would say you are upsetting a certain cavalier again. To say nothing of the horse."  The goddess arose.

"Wait-- Stay you a moment--!" For all the goddesses purported gift to her of clarity, she'd been left with far greater a store of questions than when she'd begun, beginning with _Why tell me these things?_ and ending with  _What do you mean you can't help?_ And to think that she would find herself crying out for  _this_ deity to linger any longer than she already had! The fact did not seem lost upon the Mother heself, for with a smile that suggested that yes, she  _was_ half the heritage of Ista's own, occasionally immensely irritating, Patron she reached forth and sent her back to her body with the gentlest touch of a hand to her belly that left a tingling knot in its passage.

\-----------

Ista woke up swearing.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So this story suffers from my usual Yuletide malady of coming up with an amount of backstory and Things I Want To Write that would be better fitted to both a Big Bang-style ficathon and an author with a lot more time to write than I have! I'm hoping that this vignette from inside the larger framework's story works well as a stand-alone, because I had a lot of fun writing it.
> 
> Ista's been through hell and high water to get where she is now, and I enjoy getting a chance to take a poke at some of the wonderful theology of the Chalion universe. I hope you like it too!


End file.
